Jim: The Linux Foundation ... it is made of all of the largest backers of Linux in the world. Many thousands of individuals in the world as well. Some of our prominent members include NEC, IBM, Hitachi, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, AMD, Intell, Novell, redhat. It is kind of everybody than Microsoft... And what we do is we provide services to help grow the Linux platform. Some of which include employing and paying people like Linus Torvalds to work on the Linux kernel. We provide a program to standardize the Linux operating system... We promote advance that help the community collaborate on Linux, such as Kernel Summit, a collaboration summit. And we work on all kinds of different collaborative development projects to enhance the Linux platform.

Mario: How big is the involvement in Europe?

Jim: It started in the US and we got a limited participation in Europe, which is ironic considering Linux really was born in Europe, but we are a young organization and we wanna extend over here.

Mario: How do you see the future of Linux?

Jim: ... I think what we are seeing is Linux is growing in three different categories. One in embedded and mobile, you are seeing Motorola ships their cell phones based on Linux platform. Google announced two months ago a reference platform for mobile devices based on Linux, Android. ... And you are seeing ... companies like Samsung, Lenovo and others with interesting new mobile devices. So there is tremendous amount of growth there. We are also seeing growth in the desktop world, not only we are seeing Linux being used in large corporations, in fact Peugeot in Europe uses Linux on their desktops and saves quite a bit of money in doing so, more importantly we are seeing pc manufacturers for the first time ship their computers to the market with Linux preinstalled. ... This is a break through. ... And finally we are seeing a ton of growth in the server side of the market. Linux has a about 35 percent market share now and that is growing, and we have trends like virtualization, where Linux is strong. ... in high performance computing, in super computing...

Jim Zemlin, formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Zemlin previously served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leader in products and services for the Apache web server. Prior to that, he was a member of the founding management team of Corio, a leading enterprise application service provider that had a successful initial public offering in July 2000. Widely quoted in the press on open source and commercial software trends, Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference, Linux World and OSCON. Zemlin is an adviser on open source strategy to various companies and governmental groups including Hyperic, Zmanda and the Chinese Open Source Promotion Union. (May 26, 2008, http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Staff)